As we continue on, we couldn’t be more excited about the future of ebooks and mobile reading. …
With that, we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months.
This is a real shame. Their product (Netflix for ebooks) was pretty good, but their Oyster Review was one of the best-curated sources of book recommendations on the internet. For proof of this, check out their list of the 100 best books of the decade so far. Can anyone suggest a replacement?
Camera Restricta is a speculative design of a new kind of camera. It locates itself via GPS and searches online for photos that have been geotagged nearby. If the camera decides that too many photos have been taken at your location, it retracts the shutter and blocks the viewfinder. You can’t take any more pictures here.
When I go to a concert (lol, like that’s a thing I still do) and I see hundreds of cameraphones shooting up to take a photo of the lead singer, I wonder: what’s the point of that? There’s nothing tying you to that photo. Anyone could have taken it, so why not just go into Twitter or something and grab someone else’s photo? Maybe even someone shooting with better equipment than you?
I don’t think the Camera Restricta will catch on. People care too much about their fitness selfies. But I still love the idea of it.
Some kind soul on Metafilter has collected together all of Alex Cox and Mark Cousins’ introductions to Moviedrome. You could do a lot worse with your day than to spend a few hours watching these. They’re like a complete film education in short, 10-minute burts. Warning: watching these will make you despair about the fact we don’t have a show like this today.
… I decided to be deliberate about marking achievements by eating one donut. Well, sometimes more than one, if it’s a really big deal. The act of donut-eating has actually helped me feel like I’m accomplishing my career goals.
Have you ever owned anything? This is why you cannot forgive any of your former lovers. Things like “having chairs” is preventing you from living your best life, and also you should throw away any item of clothing you’re not currently wearing. If it’s not on your skin, you don’t really love it, do you?
“I see life as like being attacked by a bear,” she says. “You can run, you can pretend to be dead or you can make yourself bigger. So, if you’re my stature, you stand on a chair and bang a pan and scream and shout as if you’re going to attack the bear. This is my go-to strategy. I really liked being pregnant, for example, because I got to take up more space.”
I smelled a rat with the Holus early on - in the original pitch, they showed a video conference using a side angle, which would require a super-fancy camera on the other end. Joanie Mercier really dug into the project and showed what a goddamn mess this is. Strangest discovery: the “staff pick” badge means absolutely nothing on Kickstarter.
I hated Ernest Cline’s previous book, Ready Player One. I genuinely hated it with a burning passion. It was one of the worst books I read last year. And the fact that everyone else (even the New York Times!) loved it made me wonder if it was just something broken in me. Which is why Laura Hudson’s review of his new book, Armada (and by extension, her critique of RPO), has cheered me up no end.
Armada often feels like it’s being narrated by that one guy in your group of friends who never stops quoting the Simpsons, a tic that feels increasingly tiresome and off-putting in the face of the novel’s supposedly apocalyptic stakes. On more than one occasion, soldiers salute each other en route to world-ending battles by solemnly swearing that “the Force” will be with them, and one character flies to his supposedly tragic and moving death while screaming quotes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is a book that ends with someone unironically quoting Yoda.
I’ve said before that Paul Ford is one of my internet heroes. If you didn’t understand or remained unconvinced as to why I said this, you need to read his latest piece for Bloomberg Businessweek - a spectacular 38.000-word article about programming and computers. Which in the hands of most technology writers would be dry and boring, but this is why I love Paul Ford so much. He’s incredibly smart and intelligent, but he approaches everything from an extremely human point of view, so it’s a wonderful read.
johnke.me